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Lebanon

Beirut may be the only place in the world where you can buy a necklace with a Christian cross and a Muslim crescent moon fused together as one. It's an unofficial symbol of Lebanon's nascent national unity. What other country would even think of making something like this? I've never seen one before. But now I own two. After growing up in the 1980s with sectarian Beirut as the poster child for urban disaster zones, it was really something to see.

Kafa is Enough in Arabic. This is the Had-It Revolution. The Enough Revolution. The Fed-Up Revolution. The Get-Out Revolution. This is NOT the "we'll remain steadfast through your foreign manipulation and hegemony" Revolution. We've had ENOUGH STEADFASTNESS.

The first quarter of 2005 has seen increasingly dramatic news from the Middle East, but equally significant developments, relevant to the future of Islam and the whole world, continue to emerge in Washington. When the United States took leadership of the Iraq intervention in 2003, few Beltway insiders grasped the immense importance of liberating an Arab country, with a Shia Muslim majority, that included in its territory the holy sites of the Shia sect, Kerbala and Najaf.

Mr Bush, after meeting King Abdullah of Jordan in Washington yesterday, shifted from a ritual denunciation of Hizbullah to a hope that it might focus on politics. He said pointedly that Hizbullah's proscription in the US was based on activities in the past.

"Enough!" That's one of the simple slogans you see scrawled on the walls around Rafiq Hariri's grave site here. And it sums up the movement for political change that has suddenly coalesced in Lebanon and is slowly gathering force elsewhere in the Arab world.